Gülsün Karamustafa reflects on the sociopolitical and economic shifts of the past ten years and the accompanying move toward a global economy. As an artist she addresses cultural displacement and economic nomadism in a universal aesthetic language that allows for a multivalent reading of her work...

In her productive career, Gülsün Karamustafa has touched on a variety of issues with strong social repercussions in content. Just to name some of these: the cultural interstices brought by the newcomers from the Anatolian provinces to the metropolitan cities of Turkey, as expressed in their folkloric kitsch and the new musical genre of arabesque; the cosmopolitan cohabitation of communities and classes; the low-budget trade circulation which emerged around the Black Sea in the last decade; historical accounts and the deconstruction of historical Orientalism in European painting; the use of photographic images from the personal archive and the corresponding therapeutic effect of remembering, and so forth...

nce the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989, the Turkish market of unskilled labour is increasingly being dominated by immigrants. The specific political conditions of migration and its motivations are depicted by the artist and film maker Gülsün Karamustafa by the example of a group of migrants in Istanbul: for Unawarded Performances...